Toby frowned. “But you said he left because of me.”
Sarah turned to him. “Not exactly the way I let you believe. You were not born yet when he left the club. You came later. We married quietly under the Harris name.
When I became pregnant with you in 1977, it changed him again. Before you, some part of him still looked over his shoulder as if the old life might reclaim him. After we knew you were coming, he stopped imagining that possibility.”
“So he did not leave the club for me.”
“He left because he wanted a life where a child could exist safely,” Sarah said. “You made that choice permanent.”
Toby absorbed the distinction.
Silas did too.
“Why keep the lighter?” Silas asked.
Sarah's eyes went to the silver object.
“I begged him to throw it away.”
Silas said nothing.
“He could not.”
A memory moved through Silas so cleanly it hurt. Elias at nineteen, flipping the newly cast lighter open for the first time, proud of something that was his and no one else's. Their mother yelling at him for smoking inside. Silas stealing it and hiding it behind the garage until Elias tackled him in the dirt.
“Of course he could not,” Silas said.
Sarah folded her hands in her lap. “He kept the ring too. And the compass. The watch belonged to your father.”
Silas blinked.
“My father?”
“Elias said it was the only thing he had left from him.”
Silas stared toward Toby's jacket where the canvas pouch rested.
That object, which Toby had nearly sold for eight dollars, had belonged to their father before either brother owned a motorcycle.
Silas leaned forward, elbows on knees.
“Then what happened in 1979?”
Sarah's breathing changed.
Until then, she had spoken with the painful control of a woman telling a story she had rehearsed silently many times. At the year 1979, that control began to crack.
Toby moved closer to her chair.
Sarah placed a hand over his.
“Your father was working at Carver Auto on the east side,” she said. “He had become the best mechanic there within six months. The owner wanted to make him a partner someday. We had you. We had this house. We were poor, but for the first time he believed the past was really behind us.”
Silas's voice was quiet. “It was not.”
“No.”
“What happened?”
Sarah closed her eyes.
“He was recognized.”
The words hung in the warm room.
“By who?” Silas asked.
“A man from the old conflict. Somebody from the rival side who had seen him enough times to know his face.”
Silas's posture changed immediately.
Sarah continued before anger could take the conversation away from her. “Elias came home three nights before the crash and told me somebody had stared at him too long at a gas station. He said the man drove off, but he knew him.”
“Name.”
“I never knew it.”
Silas's eyes hardened. “Elias would have known.”
“Yes.”